Mom gives birth to slain police officer’s baby over two years after preserving his sperm

The widow of an NYPD officer gave birth to a baby girl on Tuesday, almost three years after her husband was killed in the line of duty.

Peoplereports that Pei Xia Chen gave birth to a little girl, Angelina, after using her husband’s preserved sperm. Chen’s widow, Officer Wenjian Liu, 32, died on December 20, 2014, after he was shot and killed him while sitting in a patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Officer Rafael Ramos, 40, was also killed while sitting in the patrol car with Officer Liu.

The night Liu was shot, Chen asked for her husband’s sperm to be frozen so that she could one day have his child. According to medical experts, a 24-hour window exists after someone dies, in which sperm can be collected and preserved. Chen used in vitro fertilization to have the baby, who weighed a healthy 6 pounds, 13 ounces when born.

“I told my friend, ‘It’s going to be a girl,’” Chen said on Tuesday. “My friend said, ‘No, you haven’t even checked the sonograms.’ But I was right.”

Liu’s mother visited her new granddaughter in the hospital and boasted on how the baby looks like a combination of Chen and her deceased son.

“She looks like my daughter-in-law,” the happy grandmother said via a Cantonese translator. “But this part, the eyes and the forehead, looks like my son. The top of the face looks like my son. The bottom looks like her mother. The head looks exactly like my son. I see my son in her.”

Chen had been trying for years since Liu’s death to get pregnant, but it didn’t take during the first several tries. Liu’s parents had no idea Chen was pregnant. The new mom wanted to surprise them.

On the night after his death, Pei Xia Chen said she had a dream her husband was handing her a baby girl https://t.co/f6U7RfvVnp

“She kept trying, but she was worried about them worrying about her,” Susan Zhuang, chief of staff for Assemblyman William Colton, said. “So she didn’t tell them until it was successful.”

Chen and Liu had only been married three months when he was killed. Police arrested Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, for the officers’ murders. Brinsley had an extensive criminal and posted hateful, loathing messages on social media about police officers just weeks prior to the shootings.

“I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours, Let’s Take 2 of Theirs,” Brinsley wrote in a 2014 Instagram post, in reference to the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

On the day of Liu’s funeral, Chen announced that he was her hero. She recently said she couldn’t wait to tell her little girl all about her “hero father.”